now, I can tell she was only waiting for me to get old enough to sell me off. I ran into her last year, but she didn’t recognize me. I popped her a good one, but when I saw her crying on the ground, asking why, I realized how stupid my anger was. Anything I could ever do to her was a small thing compared to what she’s already done to herself. Some nasty whore’s disease was eating her up from the inside out, and I gave her all the money I had on me, telling her to go see a doctor, but she probably just spent it all on drugs the second I was outta her sight. She’s probably dead and buried in some unmarked grave by now, unremembered by anyone but me. She died alone, because she sold the only family she’d ever had.
“Anyway, I spent one night at the brothel, horrified at what they taught me I’d have to do to eventually buy my freedom. I didn’t know about sex back then, and the thought doing it with strange men frightened me, so I ran away and never looked back.
I’ve spent my life wandering from town to town, crap job to crap job, wondering if this is all there is to life. I mean, there has to be something better out there, right? I guess that’s why I want a baby so much. I’m trying to find something meaningful, like loving a child of my very own. And I kinda wanna prove that I can be a better mother than mine ever was.”
“That’s horrible,” Gabriel muttered, feeling deep pangs of sympathy. Such
emotions had been buried within him for so long, he’d almost forgotten he had them. “I shouldn’t have made you tell me about it.”
“I don’t want your pity,” Sam snapped. “Lookit me now! I’ve got a great job.
I’m an NVM. I’m gonna get my baby with a pure as can be father. I’ve never once taken money for sex just to pay the bills like my whoring mother! I’ve triumphed over every horrible thing that tried to drag me down. I won. So keep your damn pity!”
“Sorry, I—”
Before Gabriel could continue with his apology, Sam flicked her wrist, pulled
back her arm and threw. Something flashed before his eyes. Turning, he followed the progress of a heavy bladed throwing knife with long red streamer tied to a ring at the end of the handle. It slammed between the eyes of what might have been the offspring of a rat and a lizard that fell into a vat of toxic waste, exploded, and then was put back together the wrong way.
“Whoa!” Gabriel could swear that he’d felt that streamer brush him on the way past. “That, was a good shot.”
“Thank you,” Sam beamed. “You can tell me your story while dinner cooks.”
Grimacing, Gabriel eyed the hideous creature. With many deformities, and the
fact that it was bleeding an acid green color, it looked even less appetizing than Indian food.
“We’re going to eat that thing?”
Sam shrugged. “A little salt, a lot of pepper, and you won’t even taste the sulfur.”
“Sulfur! I’m no chemistry expert, but isn’t that poisonous?”
“Bah, it won’t kill you,” Sam cheerily dismounted and yanked her knife free of the mutant.
Sighing, Gabriel slid out of his saddle and hobbled the cathors so they could not wander far while unattended.
As Sam sliced open the belly of the mutant, the contents splattered onto Gabriel’s boots.
“Stand back,” she laughed. “Some of them are contents under pressure.”
Fixing a rather fake smile on his face, Gabriel nodded. “Thanks for the warning.”
Grumbling about the unfairness of the universe, Gabriel cleaned off his boots.
His poor mother was probably sick with grief over the news that her baby had taken the Greyhound bus straight to that fearful courtroom in the sky to be judged for his sins.
Despite all those childhood fantasies of being a hero on other worlds, he longed to return to the courtroom. He was always so alive while laying a case before the jury. He’d turned out to be quite the pussy, hadn’t he? His father had been right all along.
“So,” Sam said, setting up her small, oil-burning stove. Mister Mittens curled up beside her and resumed his napping. “What about your parents?”
“Ah, right,” Gabriel said, sitting. “My parents. My mother loved my father so much she never left him, even when he beat her bloody in a drunken rage at lest once a month. I hated him so much, and even when he was sober he hated me. He didn’t approve of anything that I liked, thought I was a pussy or queer, always said I didn’t have what it takes to be a real man.”
“Sounds familiar,” Sam muttered while she spitted chunks of green meat on sticks and roasted them over the small, but disproportionately hot flame from the stove, sprinkling on salt and a ton of pepper. “She never hit me, but my mother’s words hurt worse than any beating woulda.”
“He hit me too,” Gabriel continued. “After he beat my mother into submission, he'd turn on me. I was always going to school with cuts, black eyes, and even broken bones, too afraid of what he’d do to me if I asked my teachers for help.
“When I was twelve, he came home more wasted than usual. When my mother
tried to explain that we didn’t have the money for him to waste it on booze he beat her unconscious, but this time he didn’t stop. He just kept hitting her, and hitting her. Blood splattered on the wall and the furniture, but he wouldn’t stop. So I grabbed the biggest knife we had in the kitchen and I told him if he didn’t stop I’d kill him with it. He looked at me, then at my mom, and the blood on his hands, and he laughed. He told me I didn’t have what it takes, and he was right. I couldn’t do it. I dropped the knife, and he got up, and he left, and I never saw or heard from him again.
“After everything he’d done to us, she still loved that bastard! Of all the things he did to her, that is the one I can never forgive. I went to college to prove I was better than his worthless, uneducated, redneck hide, and I became a lawyer to make sure people like him never hurt people like us ever again.”
“College,” Sam asked. “You mean you went to University?”
“For eight years,” Gabriel nodded. “Four of general studies at a local college, then four more at an Ivy League law school.”
“Wow,” Sam said in awe. “You’ve had eight whole years of school? Then why are you so dumb?”
“That was just college,” Gabriel said. “I went to thirteen years of school before that as a kid.”
“You must have been rich to afford all that schooling,” Sam said. “My mother could only afford to send me to primary school for three years. I learned to read, and write, and do numbers, but not much else. I’m saving up lotsa money so that when it’s born, my baby can go to school a lot more than I did, and to University too.”
Sighing, Gabriel sat back, looking up at the impossible sky. His story had
dredged up a lot of horrible things from his childhood, and the voice of his father, ranting about him not being good enough, seemed louder than usual. He wished that voice would just go away and stop haunting him. He wished he could move past what his father had done to him all those years ago and move on with his life. Something about the retelling of the story was nagging at him, as though he’d knowingly lied, and felt guilty for it, but he’d told it all true.
“He really messed you up, didn’t he,” Sam asked.
“That he did,” Gabriel agreed, trying to ignore the none-too-appetizing scent
rising off the meat. “We’re really going to eat that?”
“I’ve known babies that cry less than you!”
“Hey,” Gabriel grumbled.